The vast bulk of the scam callers are coming out of call centres in India
and the number of the centres is reported to be steadily increasing.
Estimates are that they are collectively stealing hundreds of millions of
dollars from victims around the globe annually.
We typically receive
multiple calls per day from these centres either
purporting to be the NBN, Telstra or Amazon.
Their automated dialers are reported to be able to make hundreds of calls
a second. Whoever picks up the call first becomes the target and the other
calls are dropped. So apart from attempting to steal money from victims,
the operations are extremely disruptive to individuals in households and
to the productivity of businesses who stop what they are doing to answer
them.
We have multiple phone lines with unique numbers and what
betrays the industrial level of the scammers operations is that typically the
phones here will all start ringing at once.
The criminal call centres in India are leveraging the experience India
has received in operating legitimate call centres including a well-trained
English speaking workforce. Increasingly the number of callers are woman.
Pressure needs to be brought to bear on the federal government.
In turn, they need to make clear to the Indian government that it
needs to end. Police corruption there is rife and it needs to be made clear
to Modi these centres have to be shut.
The Department of Communications needs to mandate changes to the
industry to thwart caller ID spoofing over the SS7 telephone protocol.
State departments of Fair Trading need to either outlaw gift cards or
or limit their dollar value to some small nominal amount. High value
gift cards - $100 to $500 - particularly from multinationals such as
Google are one of the international funds transfer payment mechanisms
of choice for scammers.
Legislation should be made that gift card redemptions are traceable
and require photo ID, akin to purchasing a SIM card.
Gift cards should only be redeemable in the country in which they are sold.
Last week, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia announced it would
allow trading in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin after a decision handed
down by the Australian Treasurer.
This decision was not only dumb, it was unconscionable.
Bitcoin has become the payment mechanism of choice for ransomware
criminal operations, particularly out of Russia and for the transfer of
funds globally for drug trafficking, sex trafficking and arms smuggling.
What's more, Bitcoin mining operations and transactions consume more
energy annually that the entire country of Finland and most of that energy
came from dirty fossil fuels. Bitcoin is estimated to be needlessly
producing about 1% of the world's CO2 emissions. China recently
banned cryptocurrency mining and transactions ostensibly to reduce their
CO2 footprint. In so doing, overnight, China reduced their own CO2
emissions by an amount that was a big fraction of that of all of Australia.
It's in India's best interest to shut them as India itself estimates it has become
the biggest target for its own scam call centres :-
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...w/84637261.cms
What a mess. This keeps getting better. Time for some serious legislation over telcos. It should be quite easy to implement geoblocks for non compliance.
